SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Water Corporation: Deploying SAP® Afaria® to Efficiently Manage Mobile Devices Used by Field Crews

Partner

SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

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Faced with a legacy solution of multiple applications that no longer supported the mobile operations of its field crews, Water Corporation of Western Australia selected SAP® Afaria® mobile device management solution (formerly Afaria from Sybase, now an SAP company) as a replacement. The company is now able to efficiently manage its mobile devices, deal with most failures in PDAs remotely, reduce testing and manual upgrades, and support growth in its use of these devices.

CompanyWater Corporation

Industry Utilities

Products and ServicesRange of water and wastewater services

Web Sitewww.watercorporation.com.au

SAP® SolutionsSAP® Afaria® mobile device management solution

PartnerCSC (www.csc.com)

Executive overview

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Why SAP

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Serving diverse users across Western AustraliaWater Corporation provides water and wastewater services to households, businesses, and farms in towns and communities spread over 1.5 million square miles in Western Australia. Its regional customer services group is responsible for the delivery of water services across this vast region. The field service crews that carry out field operations, maintenance, and asset management activities are equipped with handheld computing devices and laptops. The corporation’s previous mobile system was recently replaced by FieldOne’s Sky application for the management of field work orders and the SAP Afaria mobile device management solution.

1.5 millionSquare miles serviced

in Western Australia

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Why SAP

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Multiple applications were inefficient and cumbersomeTo support handheld devices in the field, the utility originally deployed its mobile computing solution to support plant maintenance functionality in the SAP ERP application. While the mobile computing solution enabled field crews to transmit basic information to and from the corporate back-end SAP solution, the platform was no longer supported and offered limited management. The difficulty of managing devices in the field increased.

Field service crews across Western Australia undertake a diverse set of business processes using SAP work orders. To support these processes, crew members used corporate mobile applications (for example, spa-tial tools) over and above the work order application. However, while these applications were linked to the mobile computing application, they were not based on the same technology. As the existing mobile plat-form didn’t support remote upgrades, management and maintenance of Water Corporation’s large mobile fleet with multiple applications was a time-consuming and cumbersome process.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Upgrading PDAs was time-consuming and costly“Previously we upgraded our PDAs only once or twice a year, as a support person had to perform the upgrade directly on the device. For field crews, this involved travel to one of our major regional centers, with some being as far away as 186 miles from their nearest base. Our annual upgrade process took up to two weeks and involved several support staff,” says Rune Mikkelsen, program manager of business ini-tiatives at Water Corporation. “Besides being a time-consuming and disruptive process in our statewide 24x7 operation, the infrequent software upgrades also resulted in functionality issues. Our field crews weren’t always able to use the latest software version that was available to them, which could have delivered improved business outcomes or resolved technical issues.”

The lack of remote training capabilities was another reason why Water Corporation decided to investigate a more comprehensive mobile device management solution. Previously, field crews needed to undergo appli-cation use training on-site in regional centers, followed by refresher sessions as changes occurred. The initial training typically took three days. Despite this significant investment in training, field staff sometimes had trouble using the application and were unable to effectively obtain assistance when required.

“Our field crews were getting increasingly frustrated as the mobile applications were complicated and difficult to handle. This led to user disengagement, with only half of our user base regularly using their PDAs to full capacity,” says Mikkelsen.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Security, scalability, and a low administrative overhead To manage Water Corporation’s large mobile fleet, the company selected SAP Afaria (formerly Afaria from Sybase, now an SAP company) in a competitive bid. By using SAP Afaria, the corporation’s mobile com-puting support group can proactively manage and secure multiple device types, applications, data, and communications critical to supporting field crews. Over-the-air and on-device encryption, together with advanced mobile security features such as a mobile firewall and antivirus capabilities, ensures the best pro-tection against security threats and compliance issues.

“We were looking for a robust solution to protect the data on our field service crews’ mobile devices. Follow-ing a comprehensive review of the device management solutions available in the market, we selected SAP Afaria due to its comprehensive feature set. SAP Afaria was not only the best solution in terms of functionality, but also has a low administrative overhead,” says Mikkelsen.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Getting work orders to the field in near real time Implemented by Sybase technology partner CSC, SAP Afaria enables Water Corporation’s mobile comput-ing support group to centrally manage its field crews’ mobile devices in an effective way. Field staff use their devices to provide updates to the SAP solution with job status, work, and event details as well as informa-tion about crew labor allocation. A work order typically changes status between 5 and 10 times during its life-cycle, with more than 400,000 work orders created annually in the system. The mobile device manage-ment platform also allows Water Corporation to send work to crews in near real time when their PDAs are communicating to the enterprise systems.

400,000+Work orders created annually

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

SAP Afaria drives confidence in mobile computing SAP Afaria achieves key benefits for Water Corporation by:

• Saving support staff up to two weeks previously spent on testing and manually upgrading mobile devices

• Enabling the mobile computing support group to deal with up to 99% of PDA failures remotely

• Supporting expected mobile device deployment increase

With a reliable, secure, and scalable mobile device management platform in place, the firm’s number of handheld devices in the field has grown significantly. Mikkelsen says, “The success of Water Corporation’s mobile computing rollout has been far greater than we had anticipated. A like-for-like mobility replace-ment wouldn’t have had anywhere near the uptake in our organization.”

Key success factors included the ability of SAP Afaria to remotely push software upgrades and updates to mobile devices in the field. This means instant access to the latest features and functionalities, even for workers in the most remote corners of rural Western Australia. Additionally, the remote control functionality of SAP Afaria offers real-time remote control capability for Microsoft Windows–based PCs and handheld devices. This gives the option of interactively helping train users on new applications, updates, and upgrades or trou-bleshooting specific devices. Using this capability, the firm was able to reduce face-to-face training for new staff to just one day, with further training and ongoing support supplied using this feature. As a result, user engagement has significantly improved, and most field work orders are now processed remotely via the mobile system, replacing manual processes. This in turn has led to better visibility of activities and events for field crews at the front line of customer service delivery.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Utilities | Water Corporation

Minimizing impact of failures on users

“With SAP Afaria remote connectivity, we can mini-mize the impact on the end user and deal with up to 99% of failures remotely. This has instilled confi-dence in our field crews, who can now obtain assis-tance when required. This allows the integrity and timeliness of the data the field crews provide to be uti-lized by the corporation to keep our customers better informed and provide better service,” says Mikkelsen. “The solution has enabled us to push two major and multiple minor upgrades of the Sky application to our

mobile fleet. The flexibility of SAP Afaria also allowed us to add an asset management component as well,” adds Mikkelsen.

99%Percentage of failures dealt

with remotely using SAP Afaria

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Water CorporationC

MP2

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Mobilized from field to officeMoving forward, Water Corporation intends to lever-age its investment and migrate more applications to the mobile platform supported by SAP Afaria. These include its operational data storage system and a meter-reading application. Another project in the pipeline is customized application access. Having SAP Afaria in place allows extension to additional applications and makes the devices cost-effective.

“We can manage and support a whole range of appli-cations across multiple device types. We plan to push tailored application packages to each device, and then to take this one step further by activating individual user profiles for each worker supported by SAP Afaria managing the device configuration,” says Mikkelsen.